Anselm, Thanks a lot for the info. I am going to attempt what you have suggested, sounds to me like this is very duable with LTSP. And I am glad to know that. BTW, I tried using the link below and it did not work, can you please resend it?
The reason we do not wish to use NFS primarily is to do with issues like, our current hw design, high availability, security etc. We do not wish for our diskless client to go down if the NFS server dies. Since this is a telco-grade product, we design to eliminate any single points of failure. The diskless engine does have a need to write some state info to a persistent store, but that would be accomplished by the application(s) itself. I have a followon question regarding the std LTSP kernel. Can I use the SLES8 (SuSE linux Enterprise Server 8) kernel if I wanted to as my diskless client kernel? Is the standard LTSP kernel based on a particular distribution? thanks again for the info! -Deepak -----Original Message----- From: Anselm Martin Hoffmeister [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2004 12:36 PM To: Gupta, Deepak (Deepak) Cc: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: Re: [Ltsp-discuss] ltsp linux with RAM disk only Gupta, Deepak (Deepak) wrote: >We have a need to run diskless linux telco-grade engines for one of our projects. So >far, I have found a wealth of information from the LTSP web site, in fact I am close >to getting a diskless client up and running. > >I have not done exhaustive research as yet, I am hoping that someone can point me in >the right direction here. For our needs we would NOT like to use NFS (to mount >root), but rather just continue to use the RAM disk. My questions: > >1 Can I reconfigure (possibly recompile) the ltsp kernel with the RAM disk >(initrd) that it initially downloads with such that I can add/remove contents to the >RAM disk. If so, is there a documented procedure to do this? > > Question in contrary: How would you want to retrieve those files? IIRC, the workstations boot of an initial ramdisk (initrd), mount the NFS-dir /opt/ltsp/i386 from the NFS server onto something like /mnt and then change-root into this directory. You could manipulate the linuxrc-script (get the initrd kit which contains all that stuff) and comment out the line that does the mount. Instead you could e.g. use something like cd /newroot wget -O- -q http://localserver/ramdisk-contents.tgz | gunzip -c | tar -x chroot /newroot (remember: at the time of nfs-mounting, network is indeed configured) You would need to put wget (+libraries) into the initrd as well, gunzip and tar probably too. The command above (correct me if I was erroneus on parameters - read manpages!) would retrieve a compressed file which then would be decompressed into the ramdisk. Remember this makes maintenance of lts.conf much more difficult. >2 If so, what are my limitations in terms of size of kernel/RAM disk combined? > > The initrd would need much space, about 70Ms reside in my /opt/ltsp/i386 (though I'm not sure which packages installed, this is my test server) which would need to be fitted into it. >3 Needless to say, I would need to configure the kernel config files to not mount >root over NFS and swap the original RAM disk root. Is there a procedure for this as >well? > > Read above. Can you tell us why you don't want NFS? Regards, Anselm ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net is sponsored by: Speed Start Your Linux Apps Now. Build and deploy apps & Web services for Linux with a free DVD software kit from IBM. Click Now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1356&alloc_id=3438&op=click _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
